Monthly Archives: November 2010

The NY Phil­har­monic, in their newfound quest to be “hip and with it”, contin­ues to hand out comps to anything resem­bling a blogger, so here I am, blogging. Chris and I had high hopes for last night’s CONTACT! show at Sympho­ny­Space; we were partic­u­larly excited to hear Gerard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil, a huge song cycle written just before his death in 1998. Grisey’s music isn’t played very often here in New York, I assume because of the daunting demands it places on musi­cians, audi­ences, and stage managers alike; his language incor­po­rates micro­tones (grada­tions of pitch outside the 12-note chro­matic scale) as well as about half an acre of differ­ently-sized gongs.

I’ll take a para­graph now to address the NY Phil’s PR depart­ment directly: “live-tweeting”Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil is bathetic on the level of “photo-blogging” your meal at Alinea; it speaks only of the tweeter himself. Take a step back and think, now; what does one hope to achieve by contribut­ing 160 tren­chant char­ac­ters to the #nyphilcon­tact bucket? Nothing beyond “concert good” or “concert bad” means much to someone who wasn’t also present, expe­ri­enc­ing the same sounds and images. A composer I vaguely recog­nized was sitting alone across the aisle from me, face perpet­u­ally bathed in his iPhone’s glow; was his twitter feed a stand-in for an absent compan­ion? Here’s the other thing. Arts insti­tu­tions are all about intro­duc­ing tech­no­log­i­cal gimmicks in the name of “outreach” and “embrac­ing new audi­ences”, but what audience do we see contribut­ing to the afore­men­tioned bucket? Composers, PR people, hardcore new-music bloggers, the occa­sional “real critic”, i.e. the audience who would come to the concert anyway, and pay for it happily, too.

But I’m being mean and negative, and the Grisey was truly, spec­tac­u­larly good. Chris and I agreed that the piece conforms to our rules for How to Not Be Boring. Namely:

use sharply defined, instantly recog­niz­able musical mate­ri­als;

struc­ture your mate­ri­als in a way that is audible;

don’t use too much, or extra­ne­ous material.

If you, too want to write a 50-minute micro­tonal rumi­na­tion on the tran­sience of life, civi­liza­tion, and the human race, then you should probably follow these rules. Inci­den­tally, Not Being Boring should be the absolute bare minimum, and beside its value as virtu­osic spec­ta­cle, I found Quatre chants quite moving; La Mort de la Civil­i­sa­tion was partic­u­larly beau­ti­ful, a glacial, methodic reading of partially destroyed inscrip­tions on Egyptian sarcophagi.

Of course, it also helped that Alan Gilbert, the small group of NY Phil musi­cians, and most of all, Barbara Hannigan (a soprano/total fox) gave a commit­ted and riveting perfor­mance. It takes the charisma of a great stage actor to hold an audience’s atten­tion for 50 minutes, espe­cially while remain­ing still and silent during, say, a five-minute drum inter­lude; anyone who saw Le Grand Macabre last spring (or, as I did, watched the videos on YouTube) knew that Hannigan would be up to the task:

Seems likely she’ll become a regular at Gilbert’s Phil­har­monic, and I couldn’t be more pleased. Thanks for the beers, Phil, and until next time.

Happy to have been Gabe’s last-minute +1 for yesterday’s Sufjan Stevens show at the Beacon. I’ve been listen­ing to The Age of Adz for the past several weeks and have grown pretty accus­tomed to its strange­ness— a kind of campy, DIY electro-futurism seem­ingly calcu­lated to flummox fans of the precious, ideal­ized-campfire-singa­long Sufjan. During the first half of the perfor­mance, which was mostly new material, the audience seemed almost cowed; it wasn’t until after the 25-minute epic Impos­si­ble Soul and the band played the inevitable Chicago that we heard girls scream­ing “Sufjan, you changed my life!”

When I listen to the record, Impos­si­ble Soul seems like about five separate songs roughly stitched together, but live, it was unac­count­ably satis­fy­ing. It’s the same kind of sense one has trying to under­stand the last movement of Mahler’s 2nd symphony; if you’re not almost bodily involved in the music, it can sound episodic, or even nonsen­si­cal (but then, Mahler doesn’t have mid-movement dance parties, or release balloons from the ceiling). It makes me so, so happy to see a “pop” composer exper­i­ment­ing with large-scale forms, and even happier to hear them work so well. I can’t exactly even say why it works, but it has some­thing to do with its place on the album, and in the show, and the thinning and thick­en­ing of textures, and the pacing of events. I suppose those qual­i­ties decide why most music succeeds or fails.

After which the “encore” section of the show felt like a completely differ­ent set— mostly consist­ing of material from Illinois, with only light contri­bu­tions from the band (by the way, yeah! that was Alex Sopp up there!). Chris Thile’s quip about Arcade Fire— “ten people doing the work of four”— felt apropos here. Sufjan ended the night with the ultimate downer, John Wayne Gacy, Jr., almost whis­pered— you could feel the entire theater collec­tively holding its breath.

Speaking of songs about serial killers, I’m playing piano in Matt Marks’sThe Adven­tures of Albert Fish on what looks to be a wholly crazy show at Gala­pa­gos on December 5th.

I made myself a new website and this is it. Take some looks around. I moved the entire thing over to Word­Press, and it’s new from the very humblest line of code on up. The theme (which is Word­Press-speak for the look and orga­ni­za­tion of the site) is custom, HTML5-ready, iOS compat­i­ble (not a lick of flash!), it’s called “Irksome­cush­ion” in homage to my very first website, and no, you can’t use it. Moving to Word­Press gives me nice things like RSS feeds and perma­links, as well as a content-manage­ment system that is quite smartly designed. I know, welcome to 2004!

Not every­thing is in place yet, in partic­u­lar the Visuals section, because I haven’t thought of a satis­fac­tory way to organize and display a gallery of pictures. (If anyone has any sugges­tions for a clean, customiz­able gallery frame­work, please leave a reply). That reminds me, comments! I’ve enabled them to start, even though I have mixed feelings about sites with comments. Out of the billions of comment threads on the internet, there are probably about 12 that have ever been inter­est­ing. Also I’ve heard that comment spam is a thing these days; we’ll see if WordPress’s filters are up to the task. Not only can you reply to posts on this blog, but you can comment on indi­vid­ual pieces in the Works section, and concerts in the Piano section, which I may live to regret. Be nice, every­body!

Also, if you’re reading this, it means you’re an unwit­ting beta-tester! That’s what the little “beta” up top means—it’s an easy way for me to launch a new website that still might have lots of errors in it, and have them not be my fault. But truly, if you come across anything on this new site that you think is a mistake or bug, please get in touch; I would be most grateful. I’m also grateful to many pseu­do­nyméd people over at the Word­Press commu­nity for answer­ing my ques­tions and gener­ally making life easier, and to Panic (shock­ingly good Mac software™) for making the wonder­ful Coda and Transmit.

Last night was the Brad Mehldau Expe­ri­ence at Zankel Hall, which I’m happy to see got a rather good review in the Times. The concert was pretty much a straight run-through of his double album (more on this in a bit) Highway Rider, for a quintet of soloists and chamber orches­tra. Matt Chamberlain’s drumming was partic­u­larly reve­la­tory to me; I’m not a jazz connois­seur by any means, but it seemed to me that he was having an espe­cially wonder­ful time on stage, foiling and delight­ing with every turn of phrase. Cham­ber­lain doesn’t move the way I’ve seen other good drummers move; he doesn’t look loose or relaxed at all, rather more like a spring-loaded puppet with fewer joints than most humans. Whereas another drummer would flick his wrist, Cham­ber­lain moves his entire arm, like a martial artist; it doesn’t look partic­u­larly comfort­able to me, but I was enthralled by the visual effect of it, and by the incred­i­bly complex layers of rhythm and timbre it produced.

Brad had let his grey hair grow out a bit, and also gotten thinner and put on a small velvet suit, which gave him a crazy-but-dapper profes­so­r­ial quality, a profes­sor who was also possibly a charis­matic and success­ful cult leader. His playing was char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally inven­tive and virtu­osic, includ­ing what sounded like an impro­vised fugue (!) some­where in the last few move­ments (I don’t think it’s on the CD). I’m not even sure I remember how to write a fugue, much less impro­vise a completely natural and bad-ass sounding one, in a jazz piece. As good as it was, Highway Rider tested the limits of my concert-sitting abil­i­ties; six years of attend­ing New Music New Haven has over-sensi­tized me to long concerts, and around the two hour mark I start to panic and wonder if my bike is still doing OK. Speaking of which, Carnegie Hall really needs some bike parking. It doesn’t have to be an eyesore; it could actually be an oppor­tu­nity to class things up. Hire a black­smith to do some wrought-iron grille work! Or hire David Byrne. Or teach David Byrne how to smith.

I opened the refrig­er­a­tor today and found myself face to face with a large cauli­flower, and nothing else. I’d picked it up at the Ft. Greene farmers’ market last weekend (which I like because it doesn’t over­whelm me). The main chal­lenge with turning a cauli­flower into an entire meal is that, frankly, it’s cauli­flower. But this is a happy story, with a deli­cious ending, good enough in fact to post it up here.

Fig. 1: cooling on my balcony.

Roasted cauliflower

Take a head of cauli­flower and hack it into medium bits. Toss it up with a fair bit of chopped garlic, smoked paprika, salt, olive oil, and (this is key) Moroccan preserved lemon. Spread it out on a baking sheet and roast at 425º for half an hour or so. While that’s happen­ing, toast up some pecans in a skillet with a bit of chili powder. Once the cauli­flower has browned parts (see fig. 1) take it out of the oven and put the pecans on top. Let the whole mess cool— it seems to get better and sweeter at room temper­a­ture.